A suspected terrorist toured potential targets in Britain including Buckingham Palace and the Shard while using fake IDs and posing as an Afghan refugee, it has emerged.

Hakim Nasiri, 24, was described as a “human bomb” when arrested in Italy this week and accused of being in an Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) cell.

Photographs posted on a Facebook page that Italian police believe belongs to Nasiri show him posing in London near hotels in London’s Docklands, Canary Wharf and the Premier Inn outside Westfield in Stratford.

Other photos show Nasiri on a commuter train in southeast London, outside Buckingham Palace and the Shard. He also posted pictures of jihadist symbols and weapons on social media.

The pictures have raised suspicions that Nasiri was conspiring to carry out an attack.

Other images, found on his phone, show the man brandishing an M16 assault rifle in what is thought to be a British supermarket.

“The phone images of Nasiri holding a machine gun were probably taken in the back room of a supermarket in England,” Vincenzo Molinese, a colonel in the Bari carabinieri, told the Daily Mail.